Professor
Bebchuk speaks at SEC hearing in favor of shareholder access to the ballot

The
SEC held a day of hearings as the final stage of its deliberations whether to
adopt the rule proposal to permit shareholders to place candidates on the company
ballot in certain situations. Professor Lucian Bebchuk participated in the day's
opening panel which discussed whether the current proxy process suffers from
problems that need to be addressed. Other participants in the panel included
Steve Odland, chair of the Business Roundtable's corporate governance committee,
Martin Lipton, founding partner of Wachtell, Lipton, and Eric Roiter, General
Counsel of Fidelity. In his remarks, Professor Bebchuk discussed the implications
of the empirical work that he has done for the discussed question. In a recent
article, Professor Bebchuk documented that the incidence of proxy contests is
extremely low. And current empirical work (joint with Alma Cohen) shows that
board insulation is negatively correlated with firm value. A transcript of the
Professor Bebchuk's comments and the hearings is available on the SEC web site
at
HEARING.